Life is full of Yellow Lights

cat man

Post navigation

I stumbled upon this game when I was reading Kotaku one day and they reviewed it. Either I’m not as unique as I thought I was or that there are more people like me out there (I’m leaning towards the latter).

Neko Atsume is a game that is low maintenance and pretty darn rewarding. You play as an unknown person that leaves food out for stray cats who visit and leave presents for you. It’s very cute and the fact that you don’t have to check in every few minutes is a huge plus. That way you’re not tethered to the phone (as if you needed another reason to these days) and you still get rewarded compared to someone who checks it religiously.

Note:the game is in Japanese, but it’s very easy to play once you get the hang of the icons. Trial and Error helps in this case.

Without going into a full walkthrough (instead check Welcome to Wonderland for a very comprehensive walkthrough), this is just to touch upon how fun this game is.

When I first started out, it felt pretty empty. After a week I think I attracted 2 or 3 cats. It felt pretty sad and I thought maybe I did something wrong. Just keep leaving food however, more cats will come. As long as you keep the food coming, so will the cats. The more cats that visit and the longer that they stay playing with the toys you leave out, the more fishes they leave you. More fishes = more currency to purchase higher value foods and toys. You have a choice of using real money to purchase in-game fishes but the way that it is, you really do not have spend your money as long as you’re patient. Suggestion: when you start amassing gold fishes, start saving up so you can buy an extension to your house to hold another food bowl and more toys (price: 180 gold fish for extension, 280 gold fish for different remodeling types).

After a while of attracting “regular” cats, “special” cats started visiting my yard. These cats are uniquely looking. You’ll know it when you see it. One looks like a Musketeer, another looks like what I would imagine if Anna Wintour was a cat, another is a Sphinx cat. It’s a treat whenever a unique cat visits your little yard. In addition to taking care of the little cats, you also have the ability of taking pictures of them and storing those photos in an album. The toys that you put out has different interaction scenes with the cats and it’s animated as well; if you experiment, you can get some of them in some nifty poses. Special cats that are only attracted by one type of unique toy will only have one unique pose, however.

The only drawback I found to this game is that you can only take pictures in landscape, and you can’t rotate the camera in portrait to take pictures of some cats that stand vertically (eg: the samurai cat, the noble looking cat, the mountain climbing cat). You end up cutting some part of them out of the picture. Other than that little pesky thing, the game is overall pretty fun.